‘The Last of the Sea Women’ Is a Stirring Chronicle of a Dying Culture
Around 37 minutes into The Last of the Sea Women, Sue Kim’s stunning documentary now streaming on Apple TV+, Woo Jeong-min dives into a sea so dark that its teal depths look almost solid. As she drifts toward an unseen seabed, you get the sense she might disappear entirely — that she might even want to. It’s a moment, caught in aching clarity by cinematographer Justin Turkowski, that neatly sums up the women at the heart of this film — people so connected to the ocean that they’re almost a part of it.
Woo is a heanyeo, a member of a matriarchal society of diving women who for centuries have combed South Korea’s coastlines for abalone, seaweed, and other seafood. Diving without oxygen, they harvest the sea floor, one breath at a time, with minimal tools. It is an aging population. On Jeju Island, where much of the documentary is focused, a reported 43 percent of haenyeo were over 75 in 2023, when Kim was filming. Where in the mid-1900s 20,000 of these women could be found working Jeju’s coast, now there are fewer than 2,000. Theirs is, The Last of the Sea Women tells us through the haenyeo’s own testimony, a culture under threat.
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Kim explores this decline through two seemingly disconnected groups. The first is an old-guard crew that have been working the sea around Jeju Island — off the southern peninsula of South Korea — for more than 50 years. The other is a surprising duo of thirtysomethings from Goeje Island, 157 miles away. Burned out by their day jobs, they quit office life to answer the call of the sea, and now offer a potential future for a culture on the brink.
Though the film’s title is never spoken aloud, it haunts the film. The Jeju haenyeo speak of a way of life that could be swept away on the next tide, maintained only by their inability to imagine life without diving. One can see why. On land, they are every bit the elders they appear, yet in the water they transform into agile creatures barely distinct from the sea life around them.
Yet their lifeblood is slowly being poisoned. What was once a clean ocean in the women’s youth is now an underwater desert of bleached coral and dwindling flora, ravaged by climate change and battered by floating refuse from China, Japan, and the mainland. As they seek to preserve their ocean, and the economy it supports, the haenyeo campaign for better conditions and to leave behind a cleaner sea. “It’s not about what’s happening to the sea for us — we’re old,” haenyeo Jang Soon-duk says in the film. “We have to leave the ocean in a better condition for our children and grandchildren.”
As the haenyeo narrate their own experience, we are led into their homes, into their gatherings; sometimes, we hear them speaking over footage of their own work. But if the tone sometimes feels mournful, even fatalistic, Kim has not crafted a memorial for the haenyeo so much as an outlet for their grief, and for the blistering energy that resounds within them. That life force escapes in bursts, most potently in their javelin-like ascents from the sea floor. Kim often lets the women’s testimony linger over imagery of the sea. Soon enough, one comes to realize that the rhythm of their speech seems to match the rhythm of the rolling waves, a kind of shorthand for just how connected to the sea the haenyeo have become. “The ocean is our home,” says haenyeo Geum Ok. “We can’t stop diving; we have to go to the sea. Even in my next life, I will dive again. Just an old woman and the sea, forever.”
This verbal documentation is a remarkable meditation on our connection to the natural world, but it’s also, perhaps, where the film’s limitations come into play. Kang Joo-hwa is cast as one of the documentary’s most prominent voices, and for good reason: Her efforts to teach a new generation at the Hansupul Haenyeo School offer The Last of the Sea Women a chance to look to the future. While anyone can apply to attend the school — men or women, of any age — we’re shown Kang teaching women under 30. Yet in Kim’s slavish dedication to the Jeju haenyeo’s testimony, many questions that arise in this setting are left unexplored. When a young student asks why they can’t use oxygen while diving — something that might make the activity more accessible, and safer, for young people — we’re never given an answer.
Instead, younger haenyeo are represented solely by Woo and her diving partner Jin So-hee. Diving off the coast of Goeje, the pair are bringing this culture to modern eyes through their popular YouTube channel. They provide a glimpse of a possible path forward for traditional haenyeo, even if the film makes it appear limited to the two of them.
If these stories feel disparate, separated by a generational gap that spans up to 60 years, in the second half of the film Kim unites these women in a collective struggle: protesting the pending release of wastewater from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, damaged by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, into the sea. Though the plant is more than 600 miles from Jeju, simulations predict that water will reach the island within five years of the initial dumping. The safety of that treated water remains debatable and the potential ecological disaster suddenly replaces the calm seas of the film’s first half with the urgency of landlocked haenyeo as they take their fight to Jeju City, then Seoul, and even the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva. (When the Goeje haenyeo travel to join the Jeju women in this fight, the heavier mood is lightened with scenes of the older women mothering their younger colleagues and trying to match-make for the unmarried Jin.)
Finally facing a tangible enemy, the haenyeo’s anger becomes all the more palpable. But the renewed energy with which The Last of the Sea Women approaches this fight is laced with a sense of futility. In August of 2023 Japan dumped the water as planned — and will continue to do so for the next 30 years.
Still, there is a sequence in which the tragedy of that hopelessness is shown in a sharp light. Jin and Woo are saying their goodbyes, promising to return to a haenyeo community that has adopted them as de facto daughters. Despite the distance, we understand these women are not separated by the sea between them but connected because of it — all, fundamentally, diving in the same water. Kim lets this scene play out uninterrupted, as the haenyeo weep uncontrollably at their parting and, perhaps, so much more.
Yet, the next day, they’re all donning their wetsuits and diving. That is the magic of The Last of the Sea Women. Even as it potently conveys the enormous challenges the haenyeo face, it always leads us back to the sea. If Kim leaves too many questions unanswered by limited reportage (especially about the haenyeo’s failure to adapt, whether divers like Woo and Jin are arresting their decline, and what the fight against the release of Fukushima’s treated water actually amounted to), they are left behind in a stirring chronicle of the haenyeo and their passion for the sea.
And if The Last of the Sea Women does chart the final gasps of a dying culture, it also reminds of our own connections — to each other and to the sea itself.
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